World through my eyes

Entrepreneurial experience in supply chain and commodity trading.

I would like to share my entrepreneurial experience in this blog. It was a mountainous task to start a firm in Rotterdam. There is always a burning thing right from a childhood to create some thing great and innovative. I started to build the idea of supply chain sharing idea from scratch and built a business plan in my dorm room. Then I passed the business to my connection to get the valuable feedback about the business plan. Some gave advise about the company and some dint reply. I took all their advise and refined the business plan. I named the company called Integralchains since the supply chain is Integrated and shared. And the motto “Time is everything” for the company since I firmly believe timing is essential.

Objective of Integralchains : Currently multiple trading and supply chain layers exist and these incurs extra cost to procure raw materials for SMEs. Our goal is to provide a cost effective solution to procure raw materials for the SMEs. The SMEs will be pooled according to the raw material requirement and then we source the raw material in bigger lot size by aggregating the demand. This reduces excess carbon foot prints and also reduces the unfair competition between large corporate and SMEs.(http://www.integralchains.com/)

I felt for this this kind of business model, technology and software plays the key role. Good interactive website for the supply chain sharing concept is the key to success.But it requires a lot of capital to build a good quality interactive website.But it seems a impossible to pitch a idea to investor to get money. I was thinking hard how to build capital to support the supply chain sharing concept.Then we thought we would start a trading company in-order to generate cash flow and also we felt that interactive website will be complementary service to the trading company.

While we are doing research to start the trading company, we decided that there is a high demand for polymer and Iron & Steel. But Iron & Steel is bureaucratic industry, entry into the industry is tough. Relatively entering into the polymer industry is relatively easy and we decided to trade polymers. We started the company when the oil price is around 60$ per barrel in May-2015 and we sourced our plastic granules from Bulgaria worth of 50,000 Euros to India. Lot of ground work and research carried out prior starting the trading to find the potential buyer, seller , transportation etc. There was many sleepless night in the process. We were happy initially and we were carrying out the trading process.

During the process, I fully learnt the art of entrepreneurship, trading, supply chain etc. For example, I used to get various quotes from Liner company like Maersk, MSC, Hapag lloyd with the lead time to the destination port and then I choose the appropriate service. But things dint go well after the oil starts dropping, which is pretty well a big blow to the new company. The oil price dropped from 60$ per Barrel in May 2015 to 27$ per barrel in Jan and the whole polymer market got hit since it is linked with the oil price. We have to face lots of hurdles to survive and till now we survive.I do not want to go in detail, Since it will take pages & pages to explain the hurdles we went though for success. Indeed we have grown to next level in terms of trading. We still have to go long long way. There will be never an end to ambition.